


Five times Anders lost his way (and how he found it again)

by naye



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: 5 Things, Anders Lives, Anders Needs a Hug, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 18:25:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5550743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naye/pseuds/naye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders, solving his problems by running away since Kinloch Hold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Anders lost his way (and how he found it again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skuldchan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuldchan/gifts).



#1

“They’re keeping us imprisoned!” Anders shouted, rage and magic coursing through his blood.

“I know, but…”

“No! No compromises, Karl! It’s too late for that.”

“It’s not a compromise!” Karl’s voice, too, was rising, though he seemed fearful at how exposed they were to passing Templars here in the study alcove.

Anders shook his head in disgust. “Their ‘help’; their knowledge means nothing if we don’t have our freedom!”

“Hush,” Karl whispered harshly, looking around warily, though there had been no sound of approaching footsteps. “Listen to yourself, Anders. You know I want to run! I want freedom for all mages, too – but I _cannot leave_ until I have mastered these nightmares.”

“We have to!”

“Anders, I can’t.” Karl’s voice was anguished. “The nightmares–”

“They’re just dreams,” Anders snapped, his anger at this latest snag in his plan – _their plan_ – to seek their long-awaited freedom. Timing here was everything. If they didn’t go as planned, it might be months or even _years_ before they got another chance.

Karl’s eyes were impossibly sad, impossibly blue.

“Anders, I can’t.”

Anders’ entire world constricted around those words, his heart freezing painfully in his chest. Ignoring Karl’s worried glances at someone opening the far door, ignoring the hand reaching out for his in a familiar gesture, he stood up, shook his head.

“Then I go alone.”

 

#2

It felt strange to have so many choices before him each new day. At the Circle, everything was scheduled, enclosed, supervised. Eat? Whatever was served, when it was served. Sleep? At curfew time for acolytes and younger mages. Go somewhere? Yes, sure – as long as the options were ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’. The Tower was their prison. The only other choices Anders had been able to make were those about how much trouble he wanted to get into with the Templars and the Senior Enchanters on any given day.

But here? Every fork in the road brought an unknown destination. Every muddy track was a promise, every brown hill a new discovery. He could even leave the path completely, to forge his own way across the land. He was free to wander anywhere, eat whatever food he could trade for herbs or steal from unwatched larders. He slept under the stars or curled beneath the thick, low branches of a fir tree, or hidden in some dry barn. Occasionally innkeepers with gout or bad toothaches or colicky babies would even let him have a room in exchange for treatment, and never mentioned his staff or robes or the amazing way their symptoms disappeared before they’d even drunk his tonics.

So yes, it felt strange, but oh so good. Was this really what life was supposed to be like? Was this what the Circle had kept him from having, all those years? It made Anders angry to think about, and he didn’t like to be angry, so he didn’t think about it.

Not unless he had to make his careful way around Templars on village streets or down otherwise empty roads. The sight of them did bring it all back. So he avoided them, and he avoided Chantries. Though of course nearly all villages with more than one inn also had a Chantry.

It was one of those times when he was busy looking inconspicuous and sneaking past the Chantry at the market square of a small town whose name he’d never caught that he came across the mob.

It was his first. Usually, he avoided crowds – though he was learning more and more about how to fit in, how to interact with people who hadn’t grown up locked in a stupid tower. But unlike the usual crowds he saw milling about at markets and fairs, this one seemed to appear fully formed around a corner, out of nowhere. Its mood was dark and hateful, conjuring fanciful images of an angry, fanged beast.

There were a few Templars swirling through the edges of the crowd, but to Anders’ surprise it seemed that they were not leading anything. Instead, the mob was acting as one – all coming together in a tight knot around a young couple. Her long blonde hair was in a braid down her back, and she was clinging pitifully to the arm of a scrawny youth with a terrified expression on his ruddy face. The girl herself, on the other hand…

Despite himself, Anders crept closer, keeping the teeming bodies between himself and the Templars, until he had a decent view. Yes – the girl’s expression was strangely vacant, as if she wasn’t seeing anything of what was happening in front of her.

Now the roar of the mob was becoming intelligible to Anders as individual voices, and what he heard chilled his blood.

“He’s a mage,” they yelled, and “He’s put a spell on our daughter!”, and “He called a demon on the poor girl” and “Kill the filthy mage!”. A shiver of terror ran down Anders’ spine, and he went as still as a hare before a pack of hungry wolves.

The Templars, faceless in their helmets, were pushing into the center of the furious knot. “Calm yourselves,” he thought they might be shouting, and “You cannot take justice into your own hands. He will be judged, by the proper authorities.”. But the mob was edging them aside, hands and fist and improvised cudgels reaching for the frightened boy. They tried to tear the girl away from him, but she held on, mindless. If he was trying to defend himself, if he was denying any accusations – or all of them – Anders didn’t hear it.

The Templars were almost at him when the first blow fell, and Anders nearly jumped out of his skin in fright. For some reason, he hadn’t thought anyone not a Templar would just _hit_ … But there was blood now, blooming brightly from the boy’s nose, dripping onto the girl’s pale hair. The Templars struck, too, trying to hold back the crowd – trying to _protect_ the mage? Anders didn’t know what to make of that – of course, they would only protect him for long enough to get him locked up in a tower and subjected to the Harrowing, but in the mass of flailing limbs and crushing backs and enraged shouts, maybe – just maybe – that wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

The mob’s anger had almost grown into a beast entirely its own, like the townsfolk were jointly turning into a massive abomination, chomping and clawing and raging.

The Templars were holding out, but for how long? They needed help. Needed there to be more Templars, needed there to be more… Through the bitter bile of fear, Anders could taste the tingling of his magic. He could part some of the crowd, clear a space for the Templars. He knew, in a moment of shocking clarity, that he could stop that man right there from raising his cudgel again; could combine elements enough to distract the crowd and give the boy a chance to run (or crawl) away.

But then he would be seen. He might be the mob’s next target – he would certainly be the Templars’. All the long days and hard miles he had put between himself and the Circle would mean nothing. He would be caught and brought back and punished. He swallowed, and the sweet taste of magic turned sour in his mouth.

As Anders chose that day he had to clamp down on a wrenching sob, and then he turned around. He took the path that led around a building and out of town and chose to run and keep running. For a long time after he made it out of town and deep into the countryside, he could still hear the sound of blows raining down on a helpless body.

 

#3

The villagers gathered to the Chantry when they heard the first terrifying rumors of the Blight growing in power. Anders drifted in after them, confident that the few resident Templars wouldn’t pay him too much attention in the middle of all this.

The Revered Mother calmed them at first, speaking of King Cailan’s bravery, of the soldiers who had flocked to the battlefield in Ostergard. But Anders heard what many of the villagers didn’t – that if the king and his armies were moving, this was more than just a few peasants jumping at shadows. And indeed, soon she was speaking more haltingly, worldly feelings like grief and fear written in her face.

“Oh, bugger,” Anders muttered as shockwaves spread through the crowd. The army, lost? Some Teyrn or another in power? That was _definitely_ more than peasants jumping at anything.

“Anders.” A gnarled hand tugged at his sleeve, and he looked down to see Ylla, the old hearth mother who had been helping him nurse the sick children through the winter cough. “If there is to be a war, we will see many of our young of fighting age leave.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong about that. “Yes,” Anders agreed, wondering what she was building up to.

“I have a feeling you won’t be joining them.”

Anders almost laughed. He might as well just knock on Irving’s door. Going anywhere near a gathering of armed forces would get him right back into the Circle’s clutches. “Your feeling is entirely correct.”

“Then will you stay?” Ylla asked in her creaky voice.

Anders hesitated. Northern Amaranthine was far removed from the southern Blight, and the armies there.

“You could do a lot of good here,” Ylla said, gazing up at him with shrewd eyes in her wrinkled, nutbrown face. “Summers here bring all sorts of disease, and if there’s a war on there will be refugees – homeless, sick.”

True. Also true that if more of the adults left, there would be fewer people to hide among, and since the Templars weren’t going anywhere… “Sure,” Anders said, at his most reassuring. “If you think the children will need me.”

Ylla beamed at him, and he sensed no hesitation in her approving squeeze of his arm. “Good.”

Villagers were beginning to gather around her, asking for advice, but she gave him one last pat on the shoulder – as high as she could reach. “You’re a good boy,” she said.

Anders left the Chantry, quietly picked up his few belongings, and left the village before nightfall. He never looked back.

 

#4

The Templars were standing between Anders and the darkspawn. The Templars – the ones who were bringing Anders back, the ones that had stolen his freedom and were most certainly going to help steal his mind after he was returned to the Tower – had their backs turned. They (and a few darkspawn, but the worst _they_ would do was kill him horribly) were all that was standing between Anders and his regained freedom. And all he had to do was nudge the ongoing scuffle in the right direction.

 

#5

The ship stank. It stank of unwashed bodies and human waste and sick and dog. Because being full of Fereldans, _of course_ it stank of dog. Some desperate, Blight-stricken refugees had paid as well to get their Mabari on board as they would have for their own children, and their ‘captain’ (Anders was fairly sure he was not the original commander of their vessel) had been happy enough to take their money and let the ‘stinking Dog Lords’ deal with the fallout (like dog shit and inhuman whining threading thinly over the general air of misery belowdecks).

Anders spoke to nobody; hardly used his voice at all except when he got confused and started thinking out loud. Thinking and talking being different was one of the many things that were suddenly difficult for them. Him. Him and Anders. Him and Justice.

Pronouns were another pain. “I” was right but so was “we” and it was both and neither at the same time, when he/they couldn’t tell where he ended and _he_ began.

Sometimes it was dark, sometimes light. Anders knew that there was a rhyme and reason to the pattern but also that time didn’t exist. Everything was happening now, always, and yet his past haunted them. Darkspawn blood bitter on his tongue, bitter in his veins. The painful pulsing of it almost gone now with fathoms of sea instead of deep, dark passages below, but they had both been there, and Anders remembered.

Sometimes he ate. Probably not enough. There was a pain in his gut, but his body was just flesh around them, and unimportant. The others aboard – stinking, miserable, terrified, sick and bored – were less than unimportant. The thought had been very clear, still lingered in now/his memory. _These humans flee instead of fight. These humans care naught for the freedom of mage-kind._ It was true. It was more than true, it was Right. So they spoke not to the others, and he tried not to listen.

Tried not to care when he heard the squalling babies and sobbing mothers and retching fathers. Tried not to notice when the fever came, or the runs. Didn’t think about his sachets of dried herbs, didn’t think about the way he could make his own pain go away if he noticed it for long enough to focus.

_I could heal them_.

_We’re a mage. They will give us away. There will be no freedom if I’m caught. There are no mages to help here; there are only those who would turn on us._

So he was a mage and he wasn’t a mage and they were silent and Anders watched their suffering and didn’t – couldn’t – help.

An old woman with blue eyes – light blue, so strangely familiar – came around to everyone, even Anders. “My son,” she implored. “He’s sick.”

Everyone looked away from her. Even Anders. Her son was a man grown, not a child, and if anyone had healing herbs or food to give up they wouldn’t be moved by the plight of this burly stranger. Even wan and sweaty as he was, his beard gave his jaw a strong, determined profile. not a man to succumb to the two weeks at sea. Not a man to be added to the growing tally of those who were tipped overboard, bodies forever denied an Andrastian burning.

Anders didn’t meet his mother’s eyes, but he did look at the sick man. His eyes were bloodshot and fever-bright and impossibly blue. There was a memory which was only half his, but it moved his tongue to form a familiar name; the name itself a question. But the mother went to the man’s side and sobbed “Johann!” and that – not ‘Karl’ – was the answer.

Anders turned away, kept himself to themselves and free from suspicion and Wardens and Templars, and that tempered his guilt when Johann’s mother started wailing at dawn, and her son’s body was taken away to be left with the sea. They were safe. He had important things to do. This was his path.

 

***

 

#0

Ashes. That was all fire could create. It was an element that could do nothing but burn, had to burn to exist. And so Fire tore through buildings and bodies and lives leaving nothing but ashes behind.

That was what Anders felt when he first looked upon what his Justice, his Vengeance, had wrought. Like fire, Justice existed to do one thing only – Right. And if in doing Right it tore through buildings and bodies and lives leaving nothing but ashes behind, then that could not be helped. It was a thing that had to be done, because it was Right, and it was right because it was Justice.

And if all Anders could see were ashes, then he must have lost his way; lost sight of how new hope would spring from this one act of vengeance as new growth springs up in a forest razed by fire. Because although he had his victory now, it still tasted like ashes. Like air polluted rather than purified, and like defeat.

With half his heart still glowing with conviction, his body felt too heavy to move. It didn’t matter; he had fulfilled his purpose. And yet it did matter, because in doing so he had torn through bodies and lives and hearts.

Hawke’s heart.

The one thing he would have done anything to protect, and it had still come to this.

Anders was expecting her to end it – end all of it, one way or another.

But she didn’t.

Hawke raised him up. She chose to keep him at her side, and to Anders it was a fresh wind blowing away some of the choking ashes.

Slowly, the ashes were swept away as she defended him, and trusted him  to fight her enemies and heal her allies, and celebrated an exhausting, confusing victory with him there among her friends. And then, with Kirkwall dwindling behind them, Hawke smiled and took his hand. “Where to?”

Heart lighter than it had been for longer than Anders could remember, he smiled back and shook his head. “No. From now on, you lead the way.”

Hawke looked at him for a long, silent moment, in which he knew she was remembering; was considering who he was and what he had done, as well as what they could do now. Knew that when she finally nodded, she wasn’t just agreeing to picking their path for the day. “Yes,” she said, and the love Anders always felt for her flared and mingled with something completely new. _Hope_. Because they would be together, and Hawke would never let him lose his way again

**Author's Note:**

> Anders fic for my wife, who is a marvelous inspiration and a great beta.


End file.
